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The second Akademy day started a bit later in the morning than the previous one, yet somehow most visitors managed to look much more tired. Maybe the social event (read Nokia sponsored beer) from yesterday has something to do with that. Even tired, people visit the talks and write code, so you can expect more code, discussions and blogs today.

OpenOffice is much more than a simple alternative to Microsoft Office... Here, we’ll show you some simple tips and tricks so that you can use OpenOffice in the easiest and most efficient way possible

Sometimes, you can recover that big oops!

During LinuxWorld Expo, Alfresco leveraged a growing relationship with Canonical to continue its open source war against Microsoft SharePoint. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

Dell is shipping two new laptops with widescreen LCD displays and Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) operating systems with DVD playback. Additionally, the largest U.S. PC maker has started offering Hardy Heron on three models previously available with the earlier Gutsy Gibbon Ubuntu release.

If you run scripts that require a lot of execution time it's a good idea to try to avoid letting them overload your system. You can run them via nice, but if for example your script is sending a bunch of emails your email daemon isn't running via nice and it may itself get out of control. One way to deal with this is by using the values in /proc/loadavg to pause when your system load gets too high.

When Sam Lamonica stepped into the CIO role at Rudolph and Sletten five years ago, he set out to tame an ungainly network by using an orderly open source network monitoring solution. "Basically there was nothing in place," says Lamonica, whose Redwood City, Calif.-based company is a general contractor in the construction industry. "The infrastructure was pretty much a hodge-podge of different, disparate pieces and systems that had been cobbled together by a couple of previous IS directors. So basically it was a swamp.

Tracking security is an ongoing concern in the software industry. Oracle and Cisco use a system called Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), while Microsoft recently announced its the Exploitability Index project. Both projects rely on evaluating the risk potential from exploitation. Mozilla's security metrics will take a different route. "We did look at exploitability at the very beginning and we decided that was a factor that is hard to capture and not all that useful," Window Snyder said. "We don't have a lot of evidence that Firefox users are being exploited."

From SIGGRAPH 2008, one of the premiere computers graphics conferences, the Khronos Group has announced the release of the OpenGL 3.0 API specification and the GLSL 1.30 shading language specification. This is the first major update to this cross-platform 3D programming API since the OpenGL 2.1 release two years ago. In this article we have a bit of information on these OpenGL and GLSL updates and when we can expect to see the Linux graphics scene moving to this new standard.

Finding a satisfactory way to index a lot of data in Linux is a lot harder than it sounds. The most popular tools like Beagle tend to be limited to single keyword searches, which are a pretty blunt tool when looking through hundreds of gigabytes of files. Some tools are a massive pain to set up, I found htree an example of this. Search tools are also frequently set up to default to running as background daemons. While this gives you instant indexed access to anything that goes into the indexed filesystem, the price you pay are massive computer resource usage, to the point where user processes frequently slow down.

The Free Software Foundation can cross off another item on its high priority list of applications that free software needs in order to compete. Version 0.6 of Marble, which ships with KDE 4.1, may not rival Google Earth just yet, but the underlying engine has the potential to do so in future versions. The main improvements needed to reach this stage are a lower level of detail and some additional views and integration into free online resources. Marble is a new tool from KDE Education, the subproject already known for such educational tools as the annotated periodic table Kalzium and the astronomy program KStars. Like them, Marble is not just educational, but has all the makings of a handy reference utility as well.

Install configure and use LXDE desktop environment in openSUSE. LXDE is a new project aimed to provide a new desktop environment which is lightweight and fast. It’s not designed to be powerful and bloated, but to be usable and slim enough, and keep the resource usage low. Different from other desktop environments, LXDE doesn’t tightly integrate every component. Instead, LXDE makes all components independent, and each of them can be used independently with few dependencies.

So, in a stroke, two security researchers (Mark Dowd of IBM and Alexander Sotirov or VMware) at Black Hat have set browser security back 10 years and rendered Vista’s security next to useless (PDF of paper here - site currently Slashdotted …).

Firefox's default bookmarks remain painfully limited. They collect only URLS, which can only be organized with annotations and folders. JetArk's Jeteye extension, with its promise to "super-power your bookmarks" promises features more suitable for modern Web browsing. With "jetpaks" that resemble the containers available in the Basket desktop note application, Jeteye largely delivers on this promise. Its main drawback is that it is better at storing than manipulating different elements, especially compared with the rival ScrapBook extension.

In the final presentation of the talk days at KDE's yearly world summit, Akademy 2008, the KDE-PIM hackers surprised the KDE community with a couple of announcements, covering nearly all aspects of PIM-related data handling. After demonstrating the Kontact suite on Windows and Mac OS during this year's LinuxTag, the KDE-PIM team continues to raise the bar for competitors on the enterprise desktop. Read on for more details.

Ocassionally, servers need to be retasked for various reasons. It has always been a challenge when the server has a distribution other than what I need. I do not want to drive to the data center to swap CDs around, so I decided to see if there was a way to remotely install the machine. I found some notes by Erik Jacobsen and used them to come up with an up-to-date how-to.

Hadoop is a library for writing distributed data processing programs using the MapReduce framework. It's got all the makings of a blogosphere hit: cluster computing, large datasets, parallelism, algorithms published by Google, and open source. Every four days or so, a nerd will discover Hadoop, write a “Basic MapReduce Tutorial with Hadoop” tutorial on his blog with some trivial examples, and feel satisfied with himself for educating the world about a yet-undiscovered gem. Comparatively, very few people actually use Hadoop in practice, and those who do don't write about it. Why? Because they're adults who don't care about getting on the front page of Digg.

At LinuxInsider, we've been busy these past few weeks trying to bring you all the most important news from the world of our favorite operating system, as we always do. But it turns out we missed something. It wasn't until we began compiling our Linux Starter Kit -- which we're fervently hoping will help show more of the world the light that is Linux -- that we discovered it: Lindependence 2008.

This blog post covers the main presentation from our ODF workshop that took place in Redmond last week: Peter Amstein’s explanation of the guiding principles behind our support of ODF in Office 2007 SP2. I’ve added explanations of some of the details that were covered verbally in the workshop, but if anything’s not clear here, please let me know.

When it was first released a year ago the tiny Asus EEE PC sparked a new generation of ultra-portable PCs called netbooks. As the name suggests they tend to be not much bigger than a medium-sized novel and are designed to surf the Internet and check email on the move. And when the EEE PC was first released it was shipped with a version of Xandros Linux.